Welcome

Overview

This web site provides information on current research from Professor Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio’s group at Rice University, as well opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students to apply and join the team (find more about research opportunities here).

Professor Dueñas-Osorio’s research focuses on computational and theoretical models for structure and infrastructure system reliability, resilience and risk assessment in the context of natural hazards, deterioration, and complex operation.Applications include the quantification of interdependencies across critical infrastructures systems, assessment of smart grid resilience, computational complexity analysis of algorithms, development of robust topologies for networked systems, design of lifeline systems using reliability-based optimization methods, evaluation of bridge system and bridge network reliability, and prediction of wind turbine long-term availability.

Risk of wind-induced roof damage for Harris County, Texas

His team frequently interacts with statisticians, applied mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists and political scientists to address fundamental infrastructure problems of practical importance.Current multidisciplinary collaborations in the context of infrastructure systems include the time-dependent reliability assessment of power systems at the distribution level, the coupling strength quantification across utility systems based on the 27 February 2010 Mw 8.8 offshore Maule, Chile earthquake, the topology assessment of water distribution networks for the city of Houston, the evacuation behavior characterization of risk-averse Houston citizens under hurricane hazards, the quantification of inter-dependencies in the space-time domain to characterize coupling of infrastructures systems during disruptions and restoration actions, and the development of efficient formulations to optimize the recovery of interdependent systems aimed to improve resilience and support decision making.

About me

Leonardo Duenas-Osorio is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. He obtained his Master degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005, both in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He received the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) award in 2005 for the paper entitled “Interdependent Response of Networked Systems”, the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006 for his work on interdependent infrastructure performance modeling and prediction, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2008 to investigate risk mitigation principles for smart utility systems, and the Outstanding Earthquake Spectra Paper of 2013 by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) for his contribution entitled "Calibration and Validation of a Seismic Damage Propagation Model for Interdependent Infrastructure Systems” published in the August 2013 issue of Earthquake Spectra.

Dr. Dueñas-Osorio joined Rice University as an Assistant Professor of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in July of 2006. He is an Associate Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a Member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), a Member of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a Member of the Institute for Electric and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and a Member of the Complex Systems Society (CSS).He is also a Member of the Joint Committee in Structural Safety (JCSS), the International Association of Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR), the Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association (CERRA), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).